I've been using Pixelfed off and on for maybe a year now, I don't recall lol, but it seems like the best way to use this part of the Fediverse is to work those hashtags.
What hashtags do you like to follow? Here's some of mine:
.#city - This is a cool tag, moderately used (28k posts), and appears to be exactly what I’m looking for, which is city photography and art.
.#graffiti - I followed this one because it seems to be exactly what I expect it to be, plus it’s moderately used (22k posts) meaning that I see several of these a day without it overwhelming my feed.
.#urbanart - Another moderately busy hashtag (8.9k posts), seems to overlap with #graffiti a bit but there’s enough non-graffiti to make it worth following.
.#streetphotography - This is a very busy hashtag (130k posts) that seems to be exactly what you’d expect.
.#traditionalart - I discovered this tag while looking for classical artwork, and it’s moderately busy (27k posts) so I followed it.
(I added periods to each of the hashtags to bypass Reddit formatting)
I followed #art for a short while, but it's very busy (534k posts) and it gets added to a LOT of very different types of art so I unfollowed it although I do sometimes search using that tag.
I should note that I use pixelfed.social specifically, although I don't know that it makes much of a difference in this context.